Want to build Mini ITX system- advice please

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Want to build Mini ITX system- advice please
started by: kaplah

Posted by kaplah on Mar. 09 2005,14:39

I was thinking of building a Mini ITX system- fanless, CF hard drive, LCD monitor and mini- keyboard.
The VIA EPIA 5000 was first on my list for motherboards
I was going to run DSL in "toram" mode anyway, so a 500mhz board with at least 128M should run well. Anyone have experience with this particular MB and DSL? About cases..... do the slimmer cases on DSL's ITX store need low profile RAM?

Posted by nucpc on Mar. 09 2005,21:27

Probably not the right section for you to have posted in Kaplah...but here you go;
I run almost exactly what you're describing (512Mb CF and 512 Mb RAM). The
performance I think is great but it depends what you're used to. For a scale;
Firefox will take ~10 secs for first launch and about 3 secs per launch there after.
If you're using it for `work' its smashing, for games it will struggle.

I have the very small C136 case but even this one ONLY requires low-profile RAM if you're
going to add an optical drive (if not then you're fine with normal RAM or even stuff nicked
from SUN Blades which comically is `high-profile').

Personally I'm now looking at some of the higher spec but also fanless ITX boards......the increase
in cost is a lot though. I've used an 800MHz board as well in the past and its notably more comfortable
than the 5000.

Hope that helps.

Posted by kaplah on Mar. 09 2005,21:33

Thanks for the reply-

Nope- not going to use it for games. Mostly a "web kiosk" in the rec room. Just a basic machine to do a little surfing and email checking.
The video is Vesa right? I can get 1024x768 at 16 bits?

Posted by nucpc on Mar. 09 2005,22:01

Sounds just right then! At present I'm using Xvesa at 1024x768x32, like all mini-ITX the board
boots off USB (v. handy when you don't have a floppy or CD to get going in the first place),
dsl runs effortlessly, haven't ever encountered any problems......CPU often at 100% for
extended periods....

Posted by Caspar_s on Mar. 09 2005,22:27

Hmmm, only thing I can think of is maybe a little more memory - DSL is only 50mb when it is compressed, I would assume it uses more when running in toram mode. If you're going to just use web/email, it would be better being cpu limited (as it almost is) than have trouble running because of ram. I've heard that a lot of browsing with low ram sometimes makes it reboot. (I have a M10000 with 512Mb - which runs a lot of things well.)

Cya

Posted by kaplah on Mar. 09 2005,23:37

I just got my Compact Flash-IDE converter board...

Works nice- I loaded a 128M CF card with a Frugal +toram load of DSL
Running in a AMD K6-2 333 w/128M ram

I haven't really surfed at length with this setup, but if you're rebooting, I'd check the cache settings on Firefox- set it to 1K... the only thing I can think of that could cause a crash or reboot from surfing is the cache ram building up so far that it encroaches on program space.... I mean, there isn't anything wrong with running a half a Gig of RAM (my main system has that much with a full load of Slackware) But I'm trying to run a little "on the cheap"..... if I see RAM at a good price I'll grab bigger sticks.